The Lindeman Center is the epitome of design that's actively contraindicated for a building's planned use. Imagine being a paranoid schizophrenic going for treatment in a building that has sharp jagged walls and looks like a frog staring at you! Textbook case of inappropriate form for function.

I've often said that if you weren't crazy when you went in that building you definitely would be when you came out. I thought it had actually be shut down, but apparently not. It is one of the worst decisions ever made--creating that building as a mental health center.

There's also an absurd amount of underused or unused space in that building. Too bad they can't move some of Ashburton Place into it. Something about zoning vs psych concerns means it will pretty much always be empty iirc.

" Rudolph tried to recreate the hallucinogenic or exaggerated mental and emotional states of the insane with neverending inchoate corridors, a chapel with a dismal atmosphere and macabre twisting stairways, one of which, like an oubliette in a medieval keep, leads nowhere. The building’s dramatic structures and subliminal imagery (there is a thinly veiled frog’s head looking out from the building’s facade) make the Lindemann Center very expressive, but also foreboding and dangerous. With a romanticised view of mental illness, Rudolph made the building “insane” in the hope that it would sooth those who dwell in it by reflecting the insanity they feel within."

This building gets pointed out to tourists on many a duck/trolley tour, mainly because a scene in The Departed was filmed on one of the staircases to nowhere (with Leonardo DiCaprio and, I think Vera Farmagia)